MongoDB, Inc, a leading free, and open source general purpose database platform, announced, yesterday, that it is acquiring mLab, a San Francisco-based cloud database service. With this acquisition, MongoDB aims to deepen its relationships with other developer-centric startup communities. The mLab team has been very successful in maintaining these relationships with the startup communities in the past.

“Over the years, mLab and MongoDB have explored ways to work more closely together. As we have gotten to know each other, we have found we share a similar vision and both believe in an engineering culture based on intellectual honesty, hard work, and respect. We were excited by the idea of working together, as part of one team”, said Will Shulman, CEO, mLab.

The acquisition will be closing in the fourth quarter of MongoDB’s fiscal year which ends on January 31, 2019. This is subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions. Currently, mLab has one million databases hosted on its platform across both free and paid tiers.

Shulman hopes that given the growing trend towards building software systems and deploying those systems in the cloud, there will be enormous market opportunities for global cloud databases. These opportunities will then be well powered by MongoDB in ways that other database technologies cannot.

Another goal that MongoDB plans to achieve with this acquisition is the ability to scale MongoDB Atlas at an even faster pace. “mLab has been providing a compelling service to their customers for seven years and we are delighted to bring this talented team into the MongoDB family”, stated Dev Ittycheria, President & CEO, MongoDB.

MongoDB Atlas is a leading general-purpose database that operates as an independent, global cloud service. Atlas is great handling all the complexities involved with deploying, managing, and scaling MongoDB on your preferred cloud provider such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, etc. It also comes with built-in security practices and automation of the time-consuming administration tasks.

“We are very excited to come together with MongoDB to modernize the way companies store and manage their most valuable asset — their data”, said Shulman.